This invention relates to a document management system that includes a document referencing system for retrieving a desired document from a document database in which electronic documents are stored and more specifically, a technology for defining the relationship between documents and a technology for referencing related documents.
A document referencing system may be used to search for other documents related to a particular document. A conventional technology for searching for a related document employs a referencing method described following, that utilizes information on the history of past referencing operations.
The invention of JP-A-3-22084 records referenced history information consisting of the frequency of access and the time of access by an information user for each option on each menu and a priority for isolating for example, those options which have a high access frequency. This helps to improve operability.
The invention of JP-A-10-111876 assesses a referencing user according to assessment standards based on the results of the referencing operations of that user. Assessment standards are used in case of referencing a patent, to assess points that include the importance and the novelty of as well as the means pertaining to, that patent. Such assessments can be applied to an individual or a group and enable a subsequent referencing user to assess the results of referencing operations.
The invention of JP-A-11-39320 has a method for searching for related documents. This method records a xe2x80x9cjob namexe2x80x9d and a xe2x80x9cjob handlerxe2x80x9d associated with the making of a document and times at which it is referenced, and automatically records a history of operations performed on that document including such things as the performance of, references and alterations to, the document. By doing this, links are created between the document and each xe2x80x9cjob namexe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9cjob handler.xe2x80x9d Usage of these links enables a user to successively extract documents related to a particular document so the user can reference a document worked on for a job, to reference other jobs worked on for that referenced document and further, to reference documents worked on for that other jobs.
The conventional art as described has problems however. To shorten the time required for referencing for each individual user and to improve operability, the invention of JP-A-3-22084 does not allow sharing of history information by multiple people. In the invention of JP-A-10-111876 if an assessment is conducted by an individual, the system applies the assessment without regard to the level of skill of the person performing the assessment. This means that if there are differing points of focus for a referencing operation the assessment applied to a particular document may differ between different people. With technology of the conventional art as described, an assessment is applied to the actual target document itself but any relation that document has to an original document that would provide a good starting point to reference other related documents, is not revealed.
The invention of JP-A-11-39320 is a system which only associates a job and a document, however this is an inadequate degree of association for document referencing purposes. Creating an association between a job and a document in the case of for example the job of xe2x80x9ccreating a reportxe2x80x9d involves collecting data to produce the document, allowing the person concerned to reference other reports they produced themselves in the past and referencing documents for citation. It is therefore necessary for the various work objectives required for the job involved to be managed as linked attribute information. There is also the problem of cases in which links are formed to all documents that are worked on many of which have actually no relationship to a job. This leads for example to situations where certain documents are referenced in relation to a certain job that have no relationship to that job. The existence of such meaningless links complicates the work of referencing documents that are related to each other.
The problems with methodology used for referencing related documents using the prior art as described above is that the links between related documents all appear the same to everybody. To achieve a more effective and flexible document referencing methodology requires that the display of links be restricted according to conditions such as the objective of the referencing user""s referencing operation, the group to which referencing a user belongs and the existence of access levels to links.
An objective of the present invention is to control the display of links between related documents to reflect the wishes of a referencing user and a link setting user.
To fulfill the above objective in the present invention restricts the display of links so as to coordinate them with the settingsxe2x80x94the inputxe2x80x94applied by the link setting user and to allow the referencing user to control the display of links based on information about the link setting user who input the link.